Taxpatriate Satyagrahi Jeff Knaebel vs. Government

Here are some more things that have cropped up on the web in recent days
that have caught my eye:

The paleocon site LewRockwell.com seems an
unusual home for Jeff Knaebel — a renunciate expatriate tax resister who
is trying to retool Gandhi’s satyagraha for the
21st Century. But they’ve hosted a number of
his essays and speech transcripts, including, most recently,
“The State
Versus the Living Dharma,” in which he examines the proper
relationship between a subject of a State and its government in the
framework of Thich Nhat Hahn’s “socially engaged Buddhism.”
He concludes that because the State violates basic ethical precepts, not
just incidentally but by its very nature, and because citizens who support
the State take on a portion of the burden of these ethical violations, it
is essential for people who want to live ethically to withdraw their
practical and moral support for the State. Excerpts:

I maintain that it is the right of any individual person to reject and
renounce a government which violates his moral conscience. I maintain
that it is my personal right, in this very body, here and now, to
ignore the State, and to refuse participation in its actions which
violate humanity and life itself. I also declare that the same is my
intention insofar as refusal to pay direct tax to any nation-state.
There can be no treason if one’s first loyalty is to humanity and
to life itself. Human life is above Nation-State. Personal conscience
and individual moral sovereignty is above State sovereignty. How can
the question of treason arise when one refuses to murder helpless women
and children? He who claims self ownership can never commit treason
because the State cannot own him. He is not the property of the State.

At TCS Daily, Arnold Kling has put forward a proposal
for a sort of
distributed secessionism that he calls “splinter states.” It sounds
something like a loosely-organized set of independent, geographically
diffuse, agorist economies, competing with the State without confronting
it directly. This proposal has triggered some long-overdue
debate in libertarian circles about civil disobedience.

Lawrence Wittner tells anti-war activists that they shouldn’t be
discouraged at how little progress they seem to be making, because a lot
of the effects they have are behind-the-scenes and may not be widely
noticed until years from now. He gives
an example
from 1958, in which public outrage and
revulsion against atmospheric nuclear weapons testing overwhelmed
Eisenhower’s inclinations to support the Defense Department’s desire for
more nuclear weapons testing and development, and eventually led to a test
ban treaty.

…[M]ake spending money into a conscious, deliberate process
through which you take control and defend yourself, through which you
demand full value. When you are skeptical of people trying to sell you
something, then you stop being vulnerable to the incredible bombardment
of ads and opinions that urge you to be a fool for “the newest,
the shiniest, the sexiest” acme product. Remember… what
you are actually trading is not a scrap of government paper but the
irreplaceable time it took you to acquire that government scrap. Make
sure you receive something equally valuable in return.

Long before the incident with the swindling computer company, I’d lost
the sense of “businessmen as heroic producers of wealth” which I’d
absorbed (briefly) from Ayn Rand’s novels. Experience taught that
businessmen were no more honest or admirable than the average Joe;
indeed, whenever money changes hands, honesty seems to decrease.
Moreover, as a libertarian I became acutely aware of how well-connected
businessmen embrace the Corporate State and glut themselves on
tax-funded contracts and state protections/privileges. (The limited
liability of corporations is a perfect example of the latter.)

Businessmen are often the biggest obstacle to the free market and the
staunchest friends of government regulation. In his article
What Is The Enemy,
Sheldon Richman writes, “the great threat to liberty is the corporate
state, otherwise known as corporatism, state capitalism, and political
capitalism. (The Therapeutic State falls into this category, because the
prime beneficiaries are corporate medical providers.)” And, so, one of
the ideological motivations behind my frugal rebellion was/is to remove
myself from the role of obedient consumer, a role that helps to
legitimize and sustain a system I find morally and politically bankrupt.

The moral necessity of defunding the
US Empire is
as follows: The Empire is engaged in wars of aggression, the endless war
on “terror,” violation of human rights and civil liberties, illegal
rendition of terror suspects to foreign countries for torture and
interrogation, denial of habeas corpus, denial of the Geneva Convention,
torture, wiretapping
US citizens,
and use of depleted uranium weapons, an indiscriminate weapon of mass
destruction. Need I go on? People said it couldn’t happen here,
but now we are the “good Germans,” dutifully doing what the
IRS
tells us to do, while the government commits war crimes in our name
with our money.

…[T]ake the following pledge: “I withdraw my mental, physical,
emotional, and spiritual energy from the corrupt
US
government. I will not give them any financial support, nor will I
willingly accept any tax-funded benefits from the
US
government. I will put my financial resources to better use such as
Vermont secession. I will starve the beast.”

Hundreds of pages of recently unsealed court records detail how
kickbacks shaped the [Iraq] war’s largest troop support contract
months before the first wave of
U.S.
soldiers plunged their boots into Iraqi sand.

The graft continued well beyond the 2004
congressional hearings that first called attention to it. And the
massive fraud endangered the health of American soldiers even as it
lined contractors’ pockets, records show.

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